Month 6: Going numb

Hello, my friends!

Trying to adhere to our unofficial "once every 30 or so days, I ask you to pray for something," here is a Monday night blog post for you all to peruse at your leisure.

I remember a moment from this past summer that I think will be with me for a long time.  I was on a treadmill at my gym, and I was cooling down after a workout.  I had forgotten my headphones, so I was watching all of the news channels that were on the TV's at the front of the gym.  As I scanned from left to right, I saw story after story that made you want to cry.  Do you remember this past summer?  Do you remember this past summer as our news cycles were filled with disappearing airplanes, shot down airplanes, ISIS beheadings, riots in Ferguson, and a dozen other stories that I don't even remember at this moment?  If that wasn't enough, there were typhoons, landslides, and mudslides.  There were collapsing buildings and bombed buildings.  That moment on the treadmill, though...everything just hit me all at once.  This world is so broken, so hurting, that it's devastating to try and look at it all.  I nearly started sobbing on the treadmill as it all washed over me.

Most of us are probably familiar with C.S. Lewis' illustration of the cattle moving peacefully to the slaughter, unaware of their danger.  For those without Christ, that is probably our enemies favorite ploy.  What about for those IN Christ, however?  What does our enemy love to use against us?  I think, and this is just my personal experience talking, that he loves to use an OVER-exposure of calamity to numb us to the state of our world.  If everywhere we look we see pain and suffering, it just becomes easier for us not to look.  It becomes easier for us to shut our eyes, throw up a fake "there but for the grace of God go I" and go on about our day, content in our salvation.  Is that what our Savior did, though?  Didn't he see the pain of the people around him, the very ones who would someday crucify him, and wasn't his heart moved to compassion?  Didn't he weep over Jerusalem and her refusal of him?  Didn't he grieve over the souls of the people who were mocking him on the cross?  He touched the unclean and ate with the outcast.  We have to do the same.

Besides telling you to watch the evening news more often, where am I going with this?  What does this have to do with Restoration?  Well, every Monday, we (hopefully!) take prayer requests in every class.  Week after week, I can safely assume that the majority, maybe even 3/4, of the prayer requests will sound something like this:  "Pray for a better relationship for me and my dad."  If not that one, maybe it will be, "Pray for my mom and I; we aren't getting along at all."  We have kids who are abused and shipped from foster home to foster home.  We have kids who live in the middle of brokenness and despair that would leave most of us in the fetal position.  What do you do in the face of relentless, systemic, pervasive brokenness and sin?  It is SO. EASY. to tune it all out.  It is SO. EASY. to log their prayer requests, and move on with my day.  My request for you this month for me is that God would not let me look away.  I don't want to view their suffering with hopeless eyes, that doesn't help at all, but I do want to view their suffering with the eyes of the Gospel.  I want to hate the sin and the corruption that has brought them to this point, and I want to yearn for the glory of God to be seen in their lives.  That doesn't come from a hurt that goes numb to protect itself.  That comes from a heart that is gloriously vulnerable and alive to the suffering that is all around it.  Those are the hearts that pray earnestly.  Those are the hearts that will rely on grace to sustain them.  Those are the hearts that will make a difference.  Will you ask God to give me that heart?

Pray for:  Consistent kindness in the classroom and a heart that feels all that God would have it feel.
Pray for:  William H. and Devin T.  These two young men have expressed some doubts over their own salvation.
Pray for:  Revival in the 10th grade.  There are a lot of things happening in that class, both good and bad.  Pray that God would bring them to him now.